The Slipped Discoth

THE VALE OF LAUGHTER by Peter De Vries. 352 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

The universe, Novelist Peter De Vries once said, is a safe with the combination locked inside, and he always plays a numbers game, hoping to open it up and get at the inner meaning. It is just as well that the operative click never comes, because when it does, De Vries will stop being desperately funny and become plain desperate. The thing to remember as the puns cascade down the pages is that his characters (and he, too) would rather keep their earthly uncertainties than lose the capacity to keep trying for something better.

Joe Sandwich, the hero of The Vale of Laughter, has his own way of saying it: "Well, a man's got to believe something, and I believe I'll have another drink." Joe is the sort who, for the sake of a gag and to be included in a rich uncle's will, names his son Hamilton. And to prove that the block is still for chipping, young Ham Sandwich at eight names a honky-tonk for the middle-aged "The Slipped Discotheque."

Joe, like most De Vries heroes, is a wit who can't get with it--it being the way of the world. Nothing really odd about him, though he does remark that "Christ and the Jews of his time were working at cross purposes." Joe wants to do good, and he tries. But the girl he kept in stitches as a suitor soon gagged on his wit as a wife. When her father took him into his brokerage office, watching the tape made him physically dizzy, and the securities he recommended for widows and orphans soon became known as "laughing stocks." When he grins into his stricken father's oxygen tent and says, "My God! You must have a strong heart to stand all this," it is a bravely joshing effort to keep mortality at bay.

When Joe himself leaves his own vale of laughter, it is the result of an unintentional practical joke, played by a friend whose analysis of Joe's humor always kills the joke. What is true of Joe is also true of De Vries: his gags are the defenses of a very serious fellow who has found no better way to fend off the daily slings and arrows.

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